The sample shop service will be used in this guide. Follow the steps given below to observe Ballerina tracing and metrics in New Relic.

Step 1 - Create a New Relic account and an API key

Sign up and Generate an API Key in New Relic.

To configure the API key in Newrelic:

Go to Profile -> API keys -> Insights Insert key -> Insert keys to create an account in New Relic.

Step 2 - Import Ballerina New Relic extension

To include the New Relic extension into the executable, the ballerinax/newrelic module needs to be imported into your Ballerina project main.bal file.

import ballerinax/newrelic as _;

New Relic extension has an Opentelemetry GRPC Span Exporter which will push tracing data as batches to the New Relic server endpoint (https://otlp.nr-data.net:4317) in opentelemetry format.

New Relic extension pushes metrics in New Relic metric format to the New Relic server endpoint (https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1).

Step 3 - Configure Ballerina runtime configurations

Tracing and metrics can be enabled in your Ballerina project using configurations similar to the following in your Config.toml file.

[ballerina.observe]
tracingEnabled=true
tracingProvider="newrelic"
metricsEnabled=true
metricsReporter="newrelic"

[ballerinax.newrelic]
apiKey="<NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY>"    
tracingSamplerType="const"          
tracingSamplerParam=1               
tracingReporterFlushInterval=15000  
tracingReporterBufferSize=10000     
metricReporterFlushInterval=15000   
metricReporterClientTimeout=10000

The table below provides the descriptions of each configuration option and possible values that can be assigned.

Step 4 - Run the Ballerina service

When Ballerina observability is enabled, the Ballerina runtime collects tracing and metrics data and both metrics and traces will be published to New Relic.

Run the following command to start the Ballerina service.

$ bal run

Compiling source

Running executable

ballerina: started publishing traces to New Relic on https://otlp.nr-data.net:4317
ballerina: started publishing metrics to New Relic on https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1

Step 5 - Send requests

Send requests to http://localhost:8090/shop/products.

Example cURL commands:

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:8090/shop/products

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:8090/shop/product \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
    "id": 4, 
    "name": "Laptop Charger", 
    "price": 50.00
}'

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:8090/shop/order \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
    "productId": 1, 
    "quantity": 1
}'

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:8090/shop/order/0

Step 6 - View metrics on the New Relic platform

You can view the metrics that were published to the New Relic platform in the New Relic query builder. You can view the metrics query data in graphical format, as shown below.

You can create a dashboard from the metrics provided by Ballerina in the New Relic platform.

Step 7 - View tracing on the New Relic platform

You can view the traces that were published to the New Relic platform in New Relic traces.